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Thursday, October 07, 2010

RANDOM THOUGHTS #14

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.

1. Supposedly, the way out of the budget mess is a new VAT (a national sales tax), but that's just taking more money from people who are already paying taxes. (Those low-earners who don't pay taxes now would be protected by a tax credit.) How about instead of more taxes, we try less spending?

2. I don't get enough calls on my cell phone to matter (one or two a week) so when I get home I leave it on the kitchen cabinet. Seems the only time I get a call is when I'm at home, and if I heard it ring at all, I cannot ever get there before it stops. Annoyingly, voice mail doesn't work and the "list of missed calls" is in some scrambled order so the call I just missed might be any of the 20 calls on the list. I gotta switch to a new phone sometime, even though I know that the missed call is almost certainly not a real one, but a salesman or something.

3. I keep seeing these rich people who own three or ten or more cars. If I were rich, I'd still own just one not very expensive car (plus the old van for when I need a pickup). I need to get where I'm going, not show off on the trip.

4. I really think that we need some new kind of punctuation mark, an "inferior period" which is used for abbreviations leaving the real period to just end sentences.

5. Note to PROJECT RUNWAY: Gray is not a color. Black and white are only barely colors. Show us color.

6. On SWAMP PEOPLE, they are hunting alligators with a .22LR popgun. What's that about? Giving the gators a fair fight?

7. I think I have come to the conclusion that Zahi Hawass (the buffoon who heads Egyptian archaeology) has a good heart, and it may just be a buffoon we need to bring history to the people.

8. I grew up in a male society where every man was obsessed with packing the gas tank (pushing in a little more so that it rounded to an even dollar). Then Jerry Seinfeld, on a commercial, deliberately changed an even dollar amount to an odd amount, and from that moment, none of us men even tried for an even dollar amount. Thank you, Jerry, for showing us the way to freedom from even-dollar tyranny.

9. I am, sadly, never going to be on reality television because of my food allergies. I can just see telling Jeff on Survivor that he has to go get me something without onions, and by the way, a diet soda instead of a bottle of wine.

10. Pet Peeve: Cop shows where the cop fires two shots out of his pistol, the slide locks back on an empty magazine, and the clueless actor continues to point the now empty pistol at the bad guy. Argh. The prop master read the script which said "hero fires two shots" and put exactly two blanks in the pistol, so the weapon was empty and the slide locked back, making the hero look like a moron to anyone who has actually fired an automatic pistol. If there is some insurance or safety issue about putting a third round in the magazine for this scene, why not use a dummy round (available in any gun store) which will cycle like a normal round (and leave the slide forward) but won't fire?